Scientists say they've discovered Washington state's first dinosaur fossil, an announcement that marks a unique find for the state and a rare moment for North America's Pacific coast.

Paleontologists at Seattle's Burke Museum said that the 80 million-year-old bone fragment probably belonged to an older, smaller cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dinosaur fossils are particularly rare along that side of the continent. Isolated skeletons and bones have been discovered at about only 10 sites near the shoreline.

Scientists think Earth's continents have shifted since dinosaurs roamed 240 million to 66 million years ago. They theorize that the area could have been underwater or otherwise uninhabitable.

Scientists haven't been able to identify what specific dinosaur the fossil comes from, since it's just a fragment. But they're certain it belonged to a theropod — a group of two-legged carnivores.

Java sparrow adds beat to song

Male Java sparrows are songbirds — and, scientists said, natural percussionists.

The sparrows click their bills against a hard surface while singing. That clicking is done in coordination with the song, much as a percussion instrument accompanies a melody. Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan observed the birds producing clicks frequently toward the beginning of their songs and around specific notes. Birds that were related produced similar percussive patterns, but whether this behavior is learned or innate is unclear.

Next the scientists, who described their findings in the journal PLOS One, would like to know whether male sparrows use bill clicks during courtship communication.

Research can take time to matter

In science, a "sleeping beauty" refers to a research paper whose importance is not recognized until many years after it is published. A new analysis of 22 million studies, published over more than a century, finds that sleeping beauties are common.

"We followed the history of these papers from the moment they were published to the moment they received maximum citations in other papers," said Alessandro Flammini, an associate professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University and one of the study's authors.

One prominent example was a paper published in 1935 by Albert Einstein and his colleagues on quantum mechanics. It was only in 1994 that this study started being widely cited by other scientists, Flammini said.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that scholars should not be judged by the immediate success or failure of a publication.

The next step is to understand more about what wakens a sleeping beauty.

Is panda eating the wrong thing?

A giant panda may look like a vegetarian on the outside, but it definitely looks like a carnivore on the inside.

A genetic analysis of 121 samples of panda poop finds that the community of microbes living inside these animals' guts is optimized to digest meat. This is despite the fact that giant pandas have been eating bamboo for at least 7 million years, and that the plant has been the bears' sole food source for at least 2 million years.

The findings, published in the journal mBio, may not bode well for the endangered species. Only about 1,600 giant pandas remain in the forests of northern and central China.

"The peculiar characteristics of its gut microbiota may put it at high risk of extinction," the study authors wrote.

News services